part more interested in securing their own personal advancement, and so they threw their support behind
whatever appeared to be attractive to the people. The campaign against Sicily appeared so attractive that
Thucydides describes the eagerness of the Athenians using the word eros, the Greek word for sexual
passion or lust. Both young and old were aroused by the prospect of conquest. In particular, the military
and the lower classes were convinced that the wealth of Sicily would provide the Athenian state with
limitless funds, conferring lifelong employment on all its citizens and helping to support the war effort.
According to Thucydides, only the general Nicias recognized that, as Pericles had warned more than 15
years earlier, expansion of the theater of operations was likely to lead to disaster. But Nicias lacked
Pericles’ charisma and his effectiveness as a public speaker. Those qualities were, however, possessed in
abundance by another of the Athenian generals, Alcibiades, who hoped to enhance his political career by
leading a successful and profitable attack on Sicily. Thucydides gives the speeches that both men
delivered in the assembly, Nicias sensibly urging his fellow Athenians to abandon their ill-conceived
plan to invade Sicily and Alcibiades depicting the Sicilian expedition as necessary to ensure Athenian
security and hinting that it will prove to be the first step in Athens’ eventual domination of all Greece.
“Let not the speech of Nicias, tending only to laziness, and to the stirring of debate between the
young men and the old, avert you from it: but with the same decency wherewith your ancestors,
consulting young and old together, have brought our dominion to the present height, endeavour you
likewise to enlarge the same. And think not that youth or age, one without the other, is of any effect,
but that the simplest, the middle sort, and the exactest judgments tempered together, is it that doth the
greatest good; and that a state as well as any other thing will, if it rest, wear out of itself; and all
men’s knowledge decay; whereas by the exercise of war experience will continually increase, and
the city will get a habit of resisting the enemy, not with words, but action.” (Thucydides, translated
by Thomas Hobbes, The Peloponnesian War 6.18.6, Alcibiades supporting the expedition against
Sicily)Having heard what it wanted to hear from Alcibiades, the Athenian assembly voted to mobilize what
Thucydides describes as “the most lavishly funded and most impressive military force deployed by a
single Greek city up to that time.” Thucydides further describes the magnificent spectacle of the fleet’s
departure and the unbounded confidence of the Athenian people who witnessed it. The contrast with the
utter catastrophe that the expedition suffered two years later could not be greater. Herodotus would
presumably have explained the Athenian defeat, at least partially, in terms of divine punishment for the
Athenians’ overconfidence. There is not the slightest hint of this in Thucydides’ account, which presents
the Athenian failure instead in terms of the quirks of fortune, poor planning, and indecisiveness,
particularly on the part of Nicias. In fact, on one crucial occasion, that indecisiveness arose out of Nicias’
conventional religious outlook: On August 27, 413 BC, when things were going very badly for the
Athenian forces in Sicily and they decided to remove themselves to a more secure location, an eclipse of
the full moon took place. Nicias, whom Thucydides characterizes as being “excessively superstitious,”
refused to order his troops to move until a period of 27 (= 3^3 ) days had elapsed, the period of time
prescribed by the seers. As a result of this delay, the size and morale of the enemy forces were allowed to
increase. The Athenians, finding themselves blockaded, were disastrously defeated in a naval battle and
were forced to retreat into the interior of Sicily, where many of them, including Nicias, were killed and
the remainder taken prisoner.
For Thucydides, then, success in political and military matters depends upon how well men are able to
foresee the outcome of their own actions and those of others and how well they are able to convince